Charlinder's Walk

by Alyson Miers

  "I miss her all the time. Sometimes I still have thoughts like, 'Wouldn't it be fun to tell Mom about this?' Is that normal?"

  "To tell the truth, I'm not the right one to ask about that. I don't know that there's a normal way to grieve for a loved one, but I was never much good at psychology."

  "Are any of us?"

  "Pardon?"

  "Are any of us all that good at psychology?" he asked.

  She frowned up at him. "For someone who’s had so little time to think about what he’s seen, I think you’re better at it than you give yourself credit for," she said. "We should call it a night. I’m tired enough and you were still on the road just this morning."

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Anima

  Gentiola took Charlinder to a basement room the next morning. It was warm like late April.

  "You're going to meet a sort of spirit guide," she explained. "It's like the feminine version of you. I have a masculine Animus, for example. When you meet your Anima, you can ask her questions, or talk to her about whatever you like, and of course you never need be embarrassed about anything that happens in those conversations."

  "And you say this will happen today?" he asked.

  "I'm sure it will happen," she replied, "in only a few minutes." There was a clay dish filled with herbs on the floor between them. She lit a candle from no apparent fire source and ignited the herbs. "Now. How comfortable are you?"

  Charlinder replied from his cross-legged position, "I wouldn't ask for more."

  "Good. Now if you're ready, close your eyes and count in your head, backwards from seven to one."

  "Okay," he confirmed when he'd done so.

  "Picture yourself in an open, wild field."

  He followed her instructions as she gave them. He walked to the edge of the field, where he found a door built into the trunk of a tree. He opened the door and took the following staircase to a tunnel built into the ground, lined with dirt and tree roots, lit by torches on the walls. He followed the tunnel until he saw the cracks of light around a doorway. The door led to a room, where he went straight to the balcony, which appeared to open up to the cosmos. He stood on the balcony and watched the stars go by as if the room were part of a ship traveling through space.

  When the stars no longer intrigued him, he turned back to the room. It was a simple, yet strikingly decorated lounge, with jewel-toned geometric shapes painted on the walls. There were several sofas and overstuffed chairs arranged around a low wooden table. It was similar to Gentiola's common area, but more colorful and enclosed. He made himself comfortable on a sofa and waited for his Anima to come in.

  The door from the earthen hallway opened, and he first saw a pair of bare feet below the hem of a dress.

  "She's here," he said in Gentiola's basement room.

  "I'll leave you alone with her," he heard her say, and her footsteps followed her back up the stairs.

  The woman who entered the spirit room on those bare feet was not as Charlinder expected a female version of himself. What he saw was a slightly older white woman dressed in a full-skirted, sleeveless, deep blue dress. She was neither short nor especially tall, neither fat nor worryingly thin, with a face that was attractive but not striking. She had straight, light-brown hair down to her shoulders, and hazel eyes. She wore a knowing, even devious smile as she settled on the opposite sofa and tucked her feet under her.

  "What brings you here today?" she asked in a familiar voice.

  "It would take too long to explain," he replied wondrously.

  "I certainly won't argue with that," she returned, "but you're not going anywhere. Stay a while and tell me about yourself."

  "Where to begin? I'm a teacher, and I don't know how many other communities even teach their youth how to read anymore. I got tired of some of my neighbors trying to use the threat of God to scare people into behaving like they didn’t enjoy life, so I took this trip to try and settle the matter," he explained.

  "And has it worked?" she queried.

  "I haven't really found anything to answer the question one way or another, to be honest. Certainly nothing to make me believe, but I'm sure it's nothing to change anyone else’s mind."

  "You sound like this doesn't bother you," remarked his Anima.

  "I know it should," he admitted. "Now here's the problem. I know that, eventually, I'll have to get back home to America--somehow, I'm sure they'll be happy to see me, even if the whole idea turned out to be a bust, but...none of that matters to me right now."

  "And why doesn't it matter right now?"

  "Because..." he searched, "of course I know this won't hold up in the long run, but...I don't want to leave this place," he finished.

  "You mean Gentiola's house?"

  "Her house, her gardens, maybe a village or two nearby. Just as long as she's here, this is where I want to be."

  "Are you in love with her?"

  "What does 'in love with' even mean? I just feel like I belong here, does that make sense? I've never felt so 'at home,' anywhere else."

  "That's remarkable, since you've been here less than twenty-four hours."

  "And yet that's all it takes, you know? This woman is the only person I know who really understands me."

  "Even when she tells you you're wrong," his Anima pointed out. It wasn't a question.

  "Well, I need to be told I'm wrong sometimes and now I've finally found someone who's willing to have these talks with me in the first place."

  "I'm sure it must be quite the experience to have someone who wants to talk to you about something bigger than their village. And I can imagine it's far more enjoyable to immerse yourself in Gentiola's fascinating conversations than to, say, think of how you'll get home."

  "No, I don't want to think about that," he shuddered. "I've just spent over two years walking around the world. Is it okay if I take a moment to catch my breath?"

  "Of course. As long as you have a welcoming hostess here, you can take your time in figuring out how you'll do it all over again."

  "And I do have a welcoming hostess," he confirmed. "She's like a kindred spirit."

  "But, you know," the Anima began, "you're not the type to take the easy way. You've gotten this far, after all, so perhaps you're not just indulging in creature comforts and enjoyable company. Maybe there's a reason why you don't want to leave yet."

  "Hey, don’t put down the creature comforts," he said. "When you spend almost two years unable to talk with anyone, then we’ll discuss creature comforts and enjoyable company like those are trivial things."

  "But aside from those," she went on, reasonably, "perhaps you're so happy to stay partly because a part of you knows there is something you need to learn from your time with Gentiola, or something you need to do here."

  "And what might that be?"

  "That much, you'll need to figure out on the outside. But think about it; you didn't come all this way just to have a few conversations about politics and religion and then go home without the answers, did you?"

  "Yeah, I’m going to ask Gentiola what she knows about the Plague, and I trust her to tell me as much as she remembers. At the same time, she seems to like having me here just for the heck of it, and I’m not going to rush her."

  "But you knew what you were doing when you left home," she said. Charlinder wasn't sure to what extent he should believe her. "Keep having those conversations. You'll remember what you're doing out here."

  Only after he left the basement did he remember how he knew his Anima's voice. It was the one he'd been hearing in his dreams.

  He wanted to find Gentiola. She wasn't in the living room. He looked in several more rooms before he stopped abruptly in a doorway.

  He found her in a small, dusty workshop-type room lit by a high, small window, and something about her composure told him he'd walked in on something private and that she shouldn't be interrupted. She was seated behind a spinning wheel, with one of her long-haired rabbits in her lap. She sat sensually upright, head tilted
slightly back, eyes closed, and rocked back and forth as she plucked tufts of wool off the rabbit's back and spun them into a fuzzy yarn on the wheel. First wondering if he should leave her alone with her spinning, he told himself she wouldn't have left the door open if he was supposed to stay out. Instead he crept into the room and sat on a low cushion-type seat facing the wheel, where he watched her work.

  She kept on like that for maybe another five minutes, or he lost track of time so easily it could have been half an hour. Then she pulled the yarn end through the flyer orifice, picked up a miniature niddy-noddy, and began reeling the yarn off the flyer.

  "Thank you for keeping so quiet," she said. She seemed not the least bit surprised to see him.

  "Is it okay that I came in to watch?"

  "Of course. Watching, by itself, does no harm. Now, I suppose you're wondering what on Earth I was on about," she offered.

  "It does seem like an odd way," he admitted, "to make a little bit of yarn."

  "Well, I don't use this yarn for knitting."

  "This is another piece of magic, I take it?"

  "Of course. It's a way to store memories. Do you find that you don't remember some things as well as you'd like?"

  "Yeah, that happens."

  "So do I. What I was just doing preserves a memory in the wool, so I can come back to it at any time and the memory will be just as accurate as at the beginning. The mind tends to edit things over time. The wool doesn't."

  "Is that a magical animal, then?" he asked about the oddly placid rabbit sitting on her lap.

  "Nevila's just a regular angora bunny," she said, stroking the bunny's now sparsely-furred back. "The magic is in the spinning, not the animal," she explained. "Although I do find that spinning off a rabbit like this yields better results than using anything more distant from its source. But no, my bunny isn't endowed with any magical powers, if that's what you're asking."

  "So she isn't over 120 years old?"

  "No," Gentiola laughed, "this one's not yet two. There are several families in the surrounding villages who breed rabbits like her, so that's where I get my babies."

  "So, how does she help you get better results?"

  "I'm not sure. I just find that I trust my memories more when I use this kind of fiber to preserve them, so of course I can't really explain why I prefer this kind of spinning. I think it's because the fiber is so close to the animal this way, and harvested so gently, that it retains more of the energy of life, so it lends itself to better magic. I also feel like this is a much more honest way to spin. There's no shearing, no washing, no dyeing, no combing, it's just the animal and the wheel, with my hands in between."

  "Well, if you trust your memories most this way, then you've probably got the right idea."

  "I'm glad you understand that."

  "So, how does the magic work?" he asked.

  "It's not something I can teach you in a few minutes," she warned.

  "Of course not. I'm just curious about what exactly you're doing."

  "Well, first I put myself into an altered mental state, and I can't really explain how I do that, I just make it happen before I start the wheel. Then I start spinning, and I concentrate on the memory that I want to preserve. When I can no longer concentrate on the memory, I stop and wind off. Longer and more complex memories make bigger hanks of yarn. Whenever I grasp the hank, the memory comes back to me," she explained. She tied a nondescript wooden tag to the end loop of the hank. "Come on, I'll show you the others."

  Behind a screen in that room, Gentiola showed Charlinder a pegboard filled with hooks, all of which except the last few at the bottom held a miniature hank of yarn with its own wooden tag.

  "This," she said, pointing to the first one on the board, a disjointed blend of fine red wool and a coarse, sparkling bluish material that he suspected was a modern-era synthetic, "is the first memory I saved in wool. It's my decision to go to university in Florence. There's no tradition behind this, but I felt at the time that an especially confusing and difficult memory was best preserved with alternating and contrasting fibers, and I've held onto the practice ever since."

  "How was that memory difficult and confusing?"

  "At the time it led to some family arguments. In hindsight, I realized that was also the time when I decided not to return to Albania."

  Charlinder said nothing. Gentiola looked back at him. "The country was a wreck at the time, and it ended up getting a lot worse before it got better, but it's not an easy thing, to say goodbye to your home."

  "You haven't told me very much about your life," he observed. "I'd like to know more."

  "Yes," she replied, looking suddenly flattered, "we can certainly do that."

  He choked on the dark red drink that Gentiola poured for each of them in the living room.

  "Oh, I'm sorry, I guess you don't have wine where you come from?"

  "We make home-brew out of apples," he said through coughing, "but it doesn't taste like this."

  "Well, this comes from grapes, and you're supposed to sip it, very gently," she instructed.

  "Right," he replied, after getting his respiration under control, "so. How did you manage to survive the Plague and still live another 120-some years?"

  "That much, I still don't know," she answered, "but I grew up in a city called Elbasan. We supposedly prided ourselves on our emphasis on education, but of course that didn't mean youngsters were supposed to go out and get a diploma at all costs. While my older brother snuck into Greece to send money home, I found, at my local high school, that I was most drawn to the life sciences. So I went to school in Florence and eventually became a microbiologist at the university in Bologna. During my education in Florence, I had a Dutch classmate named Pauline, who introduced me to her other friends. We were the ones she trusted to protect the secrets she was about to share, and she began teaching us magic. I was the one in the group who picked up her teachings the best, and in fact I eventually taught her some things at least as valuable as what she taught me. In the end, I learned a lot more magic than she ever knew.

  "Of course, university only goes on so long, and eventually Pauline went back to the Netherlands and the rest of us went our separate ways. I had my job and research in Bologna. I didn’t really have friends after I finished my Master’s degree. I got along well enough with my colleagues, but I think they just never really knew what to make of me. I kept in touch with my family, though not very frequently, until my parents died, at which point my younger brother took the next visa to Canada.

  "There wasn't much to report after that, until the Plague happened when I was thirty-five. I can only suppose it's the magic that's kept me from aging since then."

  "Did magic keep you from aging before the Plague?" Charlinder asked.

  "No one I knew at the time said anything to that effect," she said curiously. "No, I think I aged normally until the disease started spreading, but since it ended in 2012, my body hasn't gotten any older."

  "How would that work, though? Why would you become immortal only after the Plague?"

  "I may never know for sure, but I can only suppose," she began, and apparently reached some difficulty, "--you have to understand, when Eileen and I were growing up, the world looked very different. The Earth, specifically, was nowhere near as healthy as She is now," Gentiola explained, as if their planet were a female animal rather than a huge piece of rock. "Human beings as a species became so populous and widespread and made such powerful advances over nature through the centuries, the damage done to the planet was staggering. You weren't around to see it, though Eileen may have written something about this. The water was contaminated, the soil was disappearing, the air was filthy--in fact the air was so altered that the balance of climate was thrown increasingly off-center, and in favor of hotter rather than cold. A few people turned that to their economic advantage, but in ecological terms, it was sheer disaster in the making."

  Throughout this explanation, Gentiola's eyes glowed brighter than he'd yet s
een. While she stopped to catch her breath, Charlinder asked, "Sorry. How was that affecting your life?"

  Gentiola took another deep breath, and when she looked back at him, her eyes were no longer flaming. "You have to remember that magic is all a process of drawing and controlling energy from the Earth and the life She gives. Since civilization spent so many centuries attacking and repressing magic, we practitioners don't know whether the damage wrought by industrialization made it more difficult to access the Earth's energies. When the Plague wiped us nearly all out, we lost all the ways we had of doing that damage, and the Earth started healing Herself, rapidly and thoroughly. She's been far more energetic in the last 123 years."

  "That makes sense. So, did witches before industrialization live as long as you?"